Francis Collins and the God of the Gaps

By Matt Young

Posted July 19, 2009

It is by now no secret that Francis Collins, the president's nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health,
is an evangelical Christian [Science, 325 (5938), 250-251 (17 July
2009)]. Collins was until recently the director of the National Human
Genome Research Institute, and I have no doubt that he will be a good
administrator. Nor do I think his religious views should have in any
way affected his appointment; the people I would worry about are those
who could not compartmentalize religion from science as effectively as Collins.

Collins's religious views may nevertheless be of some interest. The primary argument in his book The Language of God
is what he calls the Moral Law (his capitalization). In Collins's view,
morality could not have evolved; therefore God exists. Specifically,
Collins argues that morality can be found only among humans. The moral
code transcends culture, he says, and therefore must be inborn. He
notes that humans are often altruistic, by which he means truly
altruistic in the sense of never expecting return on their altruistic
investment. He briefly notes the arguments of sociobiologists to the
effect that altruism can provide indirect benefit to the altruist and
uses infanticide among monkeys to demonstrate that monkeys are not
altruistic. He observes that worker ants are altruistic (maybe that
should have been in quotation marks) because they have the same genes
as the queen but dismisses the possibility that altruism among humans
could have a genetic basis.

Now Collins may be right, but telling us that monkeys commit
infanticide and neglecting to tell us that humans also commit
infanticide is cherry-picking data in the worst way.

In short, the case that altruism or morality could have evolved
is strong, and Collins makes no serious effort to refute it. He goes on
to tell us that the "Moral Law shone its bright white light into the
recesses of [his] childish atheism" and concludes, with no logical or
convincing argument, that his God must be a theist god as opposed to a
deist god. Collins drew his conclusions, according to his own
testimony, after having read Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis, when he was 27.

In a subsequent chapter, Collins describes the joy he got from
discovering something not previously known, from discovering a little
bit of truth. He longs, however, for a greater Truth and conflates the
presumed existence of that Truth with "something much grander than
ourselves." He presents no real evidence for the existence of such a
Truth, but at least he doesn't like Freud.

To say that Collins read a single book, was snowed, and converted
from atheism to Christianity would be an exaggeration, but possibly not
an outrageous exaggeration. Indeed, in his discussions of religion, he
comes across as credulous, at best. Happily, Richard B. Hoppe says, in
a report
on a presentation in 2007, "According to Collins, naturalistic science
can't account for human Moral Law (Collins' capitalization) or the
origin of the universe and its (alleged) fine-tuning, and therefore
belief in a God is at least partly justified. To his credit, Collins
answered that he wasn't claiming 'proofs' (his word) but rather only
indications or pointers," not dispositive evidence. Hoppe added
privately that Collins had said that his faith would not be affected if
it turned out that morality could be an evolved trait. Collins is
evidently flexible in his thinking, and possibly he is reevaluating his
position on the relation between morality and theism.

Here is a handful of references that help make the case for the
existence of morality or altruism among nonhuman animals or for the
evolution of morality. Some of them appeared after Collins's book.